Bithumb and Coinbase face security concerns – What did attackers actually access?

South Korea’s second-largest cryptocurrency exchange, Bithumb, is making headlines, but not for the right reasons.

On the 28th of October, an outsider allegedly broke into Bithumb’s internal mobile groupware system, which employees use for communication and work-related activities, according to Yonhap News.

Personal information was reportedly taken, although the exchange is still investigating whether customer data was included.

However, Bithumb emphasized that the compromised system operates separately from its trading platform, meaning the breach did not provide direct access to customers’ crypto assets. At the same time, there were no cryptocurrency losses that had been reported so far.

Other companies compromised in the past 12 hours

This comes as asset manager Mirae Asset Global Investments and brokerage firm Daishin Securities were also among the affected companies. Here, Daishin Securities disclosed that personal and credit information belonging to 38,490 customers had been leaked in an external attack.

Soon after the revelation, the company reportedly implemented emergency measures. Meanwhile, South Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) began assessing the incidents and sent an on-site inspection team to Daishin Securities.

Meanwhile, Mirae Asset said it detected and blocked abnormal access to some web systems. The company said investor information had not been affected.

The differing disclosures left each firm facing a separate task: establishing what attackers accessed and whose information was exposed.

Could AI make financial attacks more frequent?

Earlier in October, authorities reported attacks affecting 16 financial firms, including banks, with approximately 100,000 cases of data leaks reported so far.

Seeing this scale of attacks, FSS Governor Lee Chan-jin warned,

As artificial intelligence (AI) is utilized as a means of hacking, security vulnerabilities will be easily detected, and simultaneous attacks will become commonplace.

He added,

Recognizing that IT security is a core function for protecting customers’ assets and information and for maintaining financial trust, I ask the Board of Directors to take the lead in enhancing IT security capabilities.

South Korea’s financial sector faces a tough time

For Bithumb, the breach also comes after a major internal control failure in February, when the exchange mistakenly credited customers with 620,000 Bitcoin [BTC] instead of 620,000 Korean won.

Although the latest incident has not been linked to cryptocurrency theft, it raises fresh questions about the exchange’s internal safeguards.

This followed AMBCrypto’s recent report that South Korea has blocked 27 unregistered cryptocurrency exchange websites, including KuCoin, MEXC, and BingX, following earlier restrictions on mobile apps.

Coinbase clears the air

All of this further coincided with Coinbase being in the spotlight, where hackers allegedly accessed contact information belonging to more than 70,000 Coinbase users.

However, Coinbase clarified that its own systems were not breached. Instead, Amplitude, a third-party analytics provider used by Coinbase, experienced a security incident that exposed some Coinbase customers’ contact information.

As expected, Coinbase put it best when it stated,

We’ve found no evidence of unauthorized access to Coinbase systems, and customer funds were not impacted.

Final Summary

• Besides Bithumb, Mirae Asset Global Investments and brokerage firm Daishin Securities also got attacked.
• Coinbase explained that the attack was on Amplitude, a third-party analytics provider that Coinbase uses, rather than its own systems.